Don’t be like Baldwin

City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito is working on legislation to decriminalize seven “minor” quality-of-life offenses ranging from fare-beating and public urination to bike riding on sidewalks. Instead of getting a criminal summons, violators would be handed the equivalent of a parking ticket.

I’m no expert on the other targeted offenses, but as a native New Yorker, I can testify that there is nothing minor about sidewalk-hogging bike speedsters. Bicyclists in New York City (other than children) are supposed to obey the same rules as motor vehicles. But it hardly matters what the law says, because there is virtually no enforcement for offending bike riders.

The result is what you might expect: According to a 2011 study by two Hunter College professors, some 1,000 pedestrians are seriously hurt each year by cyclists statewide. About half of the injuries took place in New York City.

That figure almost certainly understates the problem. The stats come from emergency room reporting and, as New Yorkers know, many encounters with cyclists are serious enough to cause days or weeks of discomfort without requiring immediate hospital care.

And nowhere in the numbers will you find an accounting of the mental stress caused by the daily interactions between bikers and pedestrians throughout the city.

The other day, I joined a lunchtime crowd waiting for the light to change at the busy corner of 57th St. and Park Ave. Without warning, a bike messenger tore through the narrow space — it couldn’t have been more than a few inches — between me and the man standing in front of me.

“Close call,” I thought, heart pounding. Before I could take a deep breath, a delivery biker coming from the opposite direction hurtled through the same narrow space. I could feel people around me stiffen. We were set up like a row of bowling pins waiting for the next ball, knowing that any sudden move could throw off the cyclists’ on-the-fly course-calculations, with painful consequences all around.

The bikes kept coming. I counted seven before the light changed to green and the crowd surged off the curb into the relative safety of the taxi-clotted intersection.

What’s ironic about the decriminalization push is that it’s happening shortly after the City Council has dramatically upped penalties for cars, trucks and buses failing to yield to pedestrians who have the right of way. If we’re cracking down on cars to create safer streets for pedestrians, why are we easing up on bikes?

The NYPD says cops give out about 10,000 tickets over the course of a year for riding on the sidewalk. That’s down some 2,000 since 2012, while bike-riding in the city has been expanding. Since the current system plainly hasn’t acted as a deterrent to bad bicyclists, shouldn’t we be upping the ante instead of dialing back?

What’s needed are realistic penalties. No, not jail time. But much more than the equivalent of a parking ticket — which will deter fewer, not more people, from breaking the law.

It’s true that the logistics of further cracking down on bike offenders would be daunting. Yet with a little imagination the problem could be solved. What about having a truck available at selected times and locations to impound the bikes of violators, the way illegally parked cars are towed away on the spot?

If only a few bicycles were impounded periodically, messengers, delivery bikers, and others would get the idea. Another possible solution: ticket not just the biker but the company for whom that person is working.

Bikes are an ecologically sound alternative to cars for delivery services, intrepid commuters, adventurous tourists and the like. But unless something is done to make our sidewalks safer for pedestrians, we risk undermining one of New York’s proudest boasts: that this has always been, like many of the world’s great metropolises, a walking city.